New Jersey Noir Part 5

It was later in the week that I finally saw the husband, pinstriped suit, gold-ta.s.sel loafers, a lot older than I expected, a lot older than Lola too, at least fifty, maybe more, balding, overweight, a surprise and no question in my mind that she'd married him for money, disappointing as I'd grown to think more highly of her, but still, I forgave her.

Over the next few weeks I got their routine down. Lola almost always came home by six; the husband not until eight, and some nights not at all, so maybe he traveled or stayed in the city if he worked late, my guess Wall Street, which was very convenient to Hoboken. One evening, I went over to where the ferries come in from Wall Street, and there he was with a scowl on his face like he was p.i.s.sed off about something, like he didn't have a gorgeous wife and tons of money, which annoyed me because some people don't know how lucky they are.

A few times I followed Lola into the city. I was curious to see what she did all day. It turned out she just took long walks along Fifth Avenue or in Central Park or went shopping in fancy stores like Saks or went to art galleries or museums, which made me like her even more; but I got to thinking she was lonely and how happy we'd be together and how she could be my full-time muse and I'd put her on a pedestal and she'd never be lonely again.

One night, a truck delivered a painting, a big one covered in bubble wrap, and when it got dark I went right up to her windows and peeked in and could see it leaning against the living room wall, an abstract, which I don't like, but figured I'd win Lola over to portraiture once she saw all the ones I'd made of her.

I knew it was getting to be time because I could hardly sleep or eat and no matter how many times I jerked off thinking about Lola's lips or her black-red nails on my flesh or her muscular legs wrapped around me, it just wasn't enough. I kept thinking, Do it now, but restrained myself because it seemed different this time, it seemed like love, and I never wanted it to end.

Sometimes, on the nights her husband didn't come home, if the weather was nice, Lola would eat outside at one of the restaurants near the waterfront, and I'd find a spot where I could watch her and take pictures, which I used for a series of paintings called Lola Eating.

I guess the thing that finally did it was the night I saw them together.

I was in my safe spot under the awning, Lola undressing in the window, and then I saw the husband tugging her toward him and he was about to switch off the lamp but she stopped him, and it was like watching a play, a horrible play, the window open-I could hear their voices though not what they said-the two of them naked, him kissing her, groping her, and if the d.a.m.n light hadn't finally gone off I'd have burst in and killed him and made Lola my own.

I must have walked through all of Hoboken that night, along the waterfront where the air was hot and damp, that fishy smell coming off the river, the view of Manhattan like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, so close you could almost touch it, but unreal. Then up to the college on the hill where a bunch of coeds were walking and laughing and I had such murderous thoughts it must have been on my face because they stopped laughing when they saw me. Then along Was.h.i.+ngton Street, all the restaurants and bars open, people chatting and smiling and having a good time as if everything in the world was okay, when nothing was okay. I wove up and down the side streets, sweating, that fishy smell following me, mixing with the garbage stewing in the hot night air, and when I finally got home there was a rat rooting around in the small plot of dirt in front of my place and I got a brick and smashed it, over and over and over, then dragged my rat-bloodied hands across half the Lola drawings, smudging the charcoal until it turned to brown mush because I was finished with her; it was over between us.

After that, I was happy to go to my job every day, building stretchers, and stayed late so I wouldn't run into her. I was getting over her, the loss and all, and there was this new girl, a blonde, who rode the PATH and lived in Hoboken, alone-I know because I followed her-and she might have become the one-I was getting ready-but then, I saw Lola again.

"Don't I know you?" she asked. She was standing over me wearing skinny black designer jeans, the crotch right at my face blocking my view of the blonde.

"I don't think so," I said, holding my breath, my heart beating fast.

"Sure," she said. "It was at Caterina's, you know, the gourmet place? You knocked a bag right out of my hand?"

"Oh-right-sorry about that."

"No biggie," she said and started chatting, asking if I lived in Hoboken, and I told her I did, starting to feel lightheaded because I'd been holding my breath, and after a minute, when I didn't say anything more, she went and sat down opposite me and put in her iPod earphones and crossed her legs, top one bouncing to the beat of the song in her head, her lips moving too, and when we got to Hoboken she gave me a little wave, then got off, and I purposely lagged behind-I really wanted to be finished with her-but when I came out of the station there she was, and she smiled, and that was it, like we'd never broken up.

I started making new drawings and paintings of her and stayed home from work for a week, and when I finally felt ready to show them I showered and changed and combed my hair and went and waited by the PATH train until I saw her.

"Hi," I said.

Lola looked up sort of confused like she didn't recognize me, then smiled and said, "Oh, hi," and I just sort of fell in line with her as she walked. I'd prepared some small talk this time, stuff I'd Googled about Hoboken to impress her.

"Did you know they held the first baseball game here?"

"Really?" Her dark eyebrows arched up.

"And it's where Lipton Tea and Maxwell House Coffee were made."

"I didn't know about the tea. But the big Maxwell House sign is still there, and I like it."

"Right," I said, a little annoyed with myself that I'd forgotten about the sign.

"You're like a regular Hoboken tour guide," she said, and that's when I told her I was an artist, a painter, and she asked, "What do you paint?" a question I really hate, but said, "Portraits," and she said, "Really? Of who?" and I wanted to say, Of you, but said, "All sorts," and she asked, "Where do you show?" which is my other least-favorite question, but I said, "I'm between galleries," and she said, "Oh, that's too bad," and I said, "It's okay," and quickly added, "I'm having a show in Europe," and she said, "Where?" and I said, "j.a.pan," because it was far away and I didn't think she'd be going there anytime soon, and she said, "I thought you said Europe," and I laughed and said, "Oh-it's all the same to me," and she laughed too and said, "My husband goes to j.a.pan all the time, to Tokyo," and I said, "Why?" and she said, "For business," and I asked, "What kind of business?" and she said, "Finance," and I said, "My paintings aren't leaving for j.a.pan for a few weeks if you'd like to see them," and she stopped and looked at me, dark eyebrows arching up again, and I said really quickly, "I don't mean to be forward, I just thought you might like art," and she said, "I do, but-" and I said, "That's great," and added my warmest smile, the one I practice in the mirror, and she said, "Well ... maybe," and I said, "How about tonight?" and she gave me that look again, then started laughing and said, "You are forward," and I laughed too so she'd think I was a good sport though I was no longer sure why we were laughing, but she said, "I can't tonight," and I said, "Of course, I understand," which is what people on television say all the time, and that was that. I was disappointed but not defeated, because one thing I have is patience.

I waited a couple of days so it wouldn't feel forced, then timed it so I'd b.u.mp into her on the PATH again.

"Hi," I said. "Oh, hi," she said. And right way I started telling her about my job, which she said sounded interesting, and I dropped some names of famous artists I built stretchers for, and she'd heard of a few. But I didn't push it. I didn't want to ruin it.

Over the next week, I made sure we happened to meet but I never asked her to come see my paintings, though I'd drop a reference to them like, "I painted half the night" or "I think I finished the last painting for the j.a.pan show," and finally she asked me if she could come see my work, and I said, "How's tomorrow night?" but real casual, the whole time my brain going, Lola Lola Lola Lola, and she said, "Where do you live?" and I told her and she said, "Really? I didn't know anyone lived way back there," and I said, "Oh, it's nice, and my studio's really big," and she said, "I don't know ..." and I said, "It's right next door to Pablo's Towing Station and Pablo's got guard dogs, so it's perfectly safe, nothing to worry about," and used my practiced smile again, and she said, "Oh, it's not that ..." and seemed to be thinking it through and finally said, "Okay, but you'll have to come get me because I'm not walking all the way back there alone at night," and I said, "Of course not, I wouldn't want you to," and she asked if we could do it on the later side because she liked to have dinner with her husband, and I tried to keep my smile in place when I said that was fine though I was afraid she'd say she wanted to bring him along, which would ruin everything, but all she said was, "How's nine?" and I said, "Perfect," and started walking away, my mind seeing Lola in all sorts of naked poses, but she called after me, "Hey, don't you want my address?" And I turned and said, "What?" And she repeated the question. And I said, "Oh, right," and laughed maybe a little too hard.

I stayed up all night arranging and rearranging all the portraits till everything was perfect, then cleaned the studio and scrubbed the little storage area behind it, which has stone walls and is dank and dark and must have been used for some kind of cold storage at one time and served my purposes really well. I even sprayed it with Febreze because I wanted it to smell fresh for Lola, and put a clean sheet on the cot, and made sure the cuffs were not rusted from the dampness. Then I showered and washed my hair and shaved and used Old Spice and put on a new white s.h.i.+rt I bought at the Gap just for the occasion.

The air was heavy with that fishy smell and I worried it might rain and I hadn't thought to bring an umbrella and had forgotten my gloves, so I pulled my jacket over my finger when I pressed Lola's doorbell.

A minute later she appeared, smiling, but her eyes looked red as if she'd been crying.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Fine," she said, but the minute she closed the door behind her she got upset because she'd left her keys inside.

"Isn't your husband home?" I asked.

"No," she said. "He's working late," and I thought, My good luck!

Lola said she had a key hidden under a mat at the back door and I followed her. The whole time she was waving a hand in front of her nose, "Oh, that Hoboken smell, it's always bad when it's going to rain," and said she'd better get an umbrella and unlocked the back door, and I said I'd wait but she insisted I come in.

When she flipped on the lights we were standing in her kitchen, which looked right out of a magazine with Mexican tiles on the floor and fancy appliances and pots and pans hanging over a huge island in the middle of the room, and when I said it was really nice she said she never cooked so it was a waste, then said there were lots of umbrellas in the front hall closet so I followed her, careful not to touch anything, past a dining room with a long table and stiff-backed upholstered chairs and the living room with that abstract painting I could just make out in the dark, and when we got to the front hallway she stopped, and turned, and kissed me, her tongue in my mouth, and I couldn't breathe I was so excited, but then she pulled away.

"Oh G.o.d," she said. "I'm sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me."

I told her it was okay, but she started crying and said she was a terrible person, that she was unhappy and didn't love her husband but couldn't leave him because he was rich and how was she going to make it on her own, and leaned against me sobbing, and I patted her hair and tried to breathe normally, thinking I couldn't do it here, not in her house, and then she pulled away again and said she was sorry but I had to excuse her, that she couldn't possibly come to my studio, not now, and I stood there a minute thinking how it had all been ruined, but then she kissed me again, and we stumbled into the living room, our mouths glued together, and she hiked her skirt up and practically ripped her panties off and tossed them across the room and tugged my jeans down and we sort of fell onto the floor, and when we were doing it she said, "Put your hands around my neck," and I did, and she tossed her head back and forth and I asked, "Am I hurting you?" and she said, "No, I like it," so I squeezed a little harder and felt her nails dig into my back and couldn't hold on much longer and told her, and she said, "It's okay, I'm on the pill," and when it was over she said, "You'd better go, my husband might come home," and led me through the kitchen and helped me on with my jacket and hugged me really tight like her life depended on it, which was kind of ironic I thought, and kissed me really hard again, and when I got outside I felt confused and it took a minute to gather my wits-my head was spinning-and I hadn't gone a block when a police car screeched to a halt and two cops got out and one slammed me against the cruiser and twisted my arm behind my back, while the other one fumbled my wallet out of my jeans. "What's going on?" I asked, but they didn't answer, just clamped handcuffs on my wrists, then one of the cops kneed me in the b.a.l.l.s and I doubled over, and the other cop said, "Shut the f.u.c.k up," and the first one said, "See if the knife's on him," and I said, "Knife?" as the cop slipped on a rubber glove and brought a small kitchen paring knife out of my pocket, covered in blood, and there was more blood dripping down the side of my jacket onto my jeans, and I heard the other cop on his radio say, "We've got him, weapon still on him too, a real bozo. The husband's dead in the upstairs bedroom, multiple stab wounds. Wife's okay, but someone from the rape squad should meet us at the OR," and I said, "No, no, it wasn't like that-" and the cop elbowed me in the gut.

Then an ambulance pulled up and I saw her, Lola, being led out of her brownstone, leaning on an EMT guy like she could hardly walk, and sobbing, her hair a mess, lipstick smeared across her face, blouse torn, her black-red fingertips fluttering at her neck like it hurt really bad.

We locked eyes for a moment, my mind going, Lola, Lola, Lola, how could you?

Then another cop car arrived and the first cops gave them my address and told them to go to my place and I pictured all the portraits I'd made of Lola on the walls and the storage room all clean and neat and smelling of Febreze, and the wind picked up and blew that fishy smell off the river as a cop shoved me into the backseat of the cruiser and slammed the door.

THE ENIGMA OF GROVER'S MILL

BY BRADFORD MORROW.

Grover's Mill It has slipped back into obscurity now, like a sun that rose out of nowhere in freakish glory before disappearing once more behind stone-gray clouds. But for a brief moment Grover's Mill was the most famous town in the country. For it was in this quiet New Jersey farmland hamlet where I was born that the Martians landed on Halloween eve, 1938, to unleash a surprise takeover of Earth with killing machines on tripod stilts.

Our family was no different than others gathered around their Philco radios, their Emersons and RCA Victors, their big Zenith consoles, listening in horror as Orson Welles's popular Mercury Theatre broadcast broke the news of the invasion from Mars. Except that my parents and my father's parents and I, forced by the Depression to live under one roof on a dead-end street off Cranbury Road, found ourselves at the epicenter of the attack. Like many in the audience, we had tuned in too late to hear any references to H.G. Wells, and didn't understand this was all meant to be a dramatic sleight-of-hand. The horror-struck voices of eyewitness field reporters, the screams and state police sirens, the devastating sounds of extraterrestrial machines hurling h.e.l.lfire heat-rays-it was all so real that even in Grover's Mill we believed the world was about to end. My mother and grandmother rushed from room to room, whipping the curtains shut, turning off every light in the house, as news flashes of increasing desperation continued to stream in on our Philco gothic cathedral. Seven thousand infantry, the grim newsman reported from the scene, were wiped out by the Martians in a matter of minutes. Pandemonium reigned. Fearing for their lives, people were fleeing, we were told, in cars, trucks, trains, and on foot, up and down the Eastern seaboard. The description of gigantic three-legged metal monsters wading across the Hudson toward Manhattan, like mere men might cross a shallow stream, was terrifying. Nor will I ever forget peeking between the drapes of our front room window, my mother's trembling hand on my shoulder, as we looked for signs of these invaders from the Red Planet. The gunfire we heard outside was, in fact, very real, though it would later prove to be some panicked farmers shooting at a nearby water tower they'd mistaken for one of the Martian tripods.

As it turned out, the world didn't end on Halloween eve that year. But my father's life did, and so did mine in a way. His suicide would become a mark of solemn, mostly unspoken shame for the Mecham family. Or, that is to say, for every Mecham except me, his namesake son Wyatt, who felt only black despair. Not that I didn't understand their shame. Because who would want to admit that an otherwise sane, sober, solid man such as my dad-a decorated World War I veteran, forced by injuries and the stock market crash into early retirement-chose to sneak out the back door, leaving behind his family to the obscenity of alien violence, only to drown himself in Grover's Mill Pond with boxes of nails crammed into the pockets of his trousers and coat?

I was not quite eight when my dad died, but I have keen memories of him, memories as sharp as paper cuts. The pipe-tobacco perfume of his mustache when he tucked me into bed and kissed me goodnight. Watching him at the workbench in my grandfather's bas.e.m.e.nt wood shop, where he taught me the craft of cabinetry-I write this sitting on a Windsor chair he turned on his own lathe. Nor did the prosthetic leg, which he himself fabricated after losing his real one to a grenade blast, slow him down when we used to walk into town on some errand or another.

Above all, we loved haunting the pond together, fis.h.i.+ng from the same bank where he had once seen Woodrow Wilson casting for ba.s.s with Walter Grover, whose family our town is named after. When the fish weren't biting, we'd take a walk around its edges, him gimping along with me close beside, drawing strength from the many beautiful hemlocks, huge willow oaks, and mockernut hickory trees that grew along the sh.o.r.e. Sometimes we'd stop and pick flowers together, a damaged soldier and his fond son, to bring home a bouquet of wild herbs for my mother, a clutch of asters or tawny day lilies. It seems to me even now that Grover's Mill Pond was so much a part of my father that when he felt the world was coming to an end, his only recourse was to go embrace its watery soul, become one with it. And like him, I grew up understanding that the pond-at thirty-seven acres really a small lake-lay at the heart of my personal universe from as far back as my conception on its very sh.o.r.es.

In hindsight, I realize that although after his discharge from the army my father was awarded a sack of medals, he was too deeply scarred by what he had witnessed on the fields of France to be consoled by some s.h.i.+ny coins dangling from pretty ribbons. Soft visions of mustard gas, of men with bayonets lurching at mirror images of themselves, of tank treads churning fallen soldiers into foxhole mud-these visited him often in shrieking nightmares that woke the whole household when I was growing up. So when Halloween eve came around, I guess my poor father had seen enough war that he couldn't face the big one, the unwinnable one, the one against the Martians.

The police found his wooden leg on a gra.s.sy beach where he presumably entered the water. At least he'd had the wherewithal to realize that keeping it on would have worked against his purpose that night. I still own it, my most cherished heirloom. And while I've heard it said drowning is the least painful way to die, the lungs filling with water just as if it were simply wet, heavy air, who would really know? In my father's case, it was the only conceivably meaningful death, so there's a dash of solace in that. And I'll take a dash of solace over a dash of salt on an open wound any day.

My mother would wind up in the pond too. After Orson Welles had his little joke on America, and Grover's Mill in particular, and my family in point of fact, my mother Mildred changed, spiraled downward. Her dark hazel eyes behind those horn-rim gla.s.ses she always wore grew misty and vacant as Christmas approached. She would be in the middle of doing something, baking bread, say, and the cawing of crows in a tree would distract her so that she'd head outside to see what the fuss was about, only to return an hour later having no memory of why she'd lit the oven and what this batter was doing in a bowl on the kitchen counter. Our bedrooms were separated only by a door, and I could hear her talking to herself at all hours of the night. I cupped my ear to that door but never understood the meaning of anything she mumbled. Native ear long nursery, peach. Tat sing, dat-tut-tat. Why the fall flow jigger? Part of me wondered if she wasn't trying to communicate with the Martians.

What I did begin to understand, and quickly, is that I was in the midst of losing her as surely as I'd lost my father. She spent a lot of chilly evenings out in Van Nest Park studying the skies for saucers even though she, like the rest of the country, had been a.s.sured by the authorities, not to mention a contrite Welles himself, that the invasion was a hoax. I suppose my mother might have been looking for vindication for her husband's death, or else hoping against all odds that some real Martians would take her away to join him. I recall thinking, as I hid behind a big rhododendron bush one evening watching her pace back and forth across the long gra.s.s, glancing up then shaking her head and staring at the ground, that she was becoming alien herself-or, at least, alienated. On the other hand, to be fair, let me confess here that she and I both did believe we saw suspicious lights that infamous night, like moving and beaconing stars in the ghastly sky.

She started drinking. I imagine it didn't take much gin-mill hooch to send her, a thin, nervous woman, off the edge. Drunk, she began saying things at the dinner table that upset my grandmother. Things like how she wished she'd never met my father and how she'd give anything to get away from Grover's Mill. How she hated its bleak bone-cold winters and sauna-muggy summers. How she couldn't stand being this tantalizingly close to Manhattan but not having a plug nickel to go bathe in those bright big-city lights.

Once when my grandmother thought I wasn't listening, she confided to a visiting neighbor lady, "Mildred's gone and turned into Grover's very own Mill Dread. If it weren't for the boy, I'd set her out on her ear, for all that she's my own poor son's widow." I cringed at her soft, confident chuckle and crept away to stalk the pond's edge.

My grandfather took a kinder approach. He was no less a carpenter than my father had been. Indeed, father had taught son. Because my mother said she'd give anything to spend the upcoming springtime days rowing out to the middle of Grover's Mill Pond to watch the skies for activity, maybe take a picnic with her son, he indulgently refurbished my father's childhood rowboat for us to use. It was so beautiful, that boat. I could never get enough of leaning my head over its side and watching reflected sunlight dancing off the water, making its varnished belly glisten with different ever-changing shapes! And I must admit it made me feel proud to take my father's place at the oars, even if I risked being seen by some of the whispering kids at school who already deemed my parents lunatics. After winter faded away, we kept it tied up at the nearby dock of a friend of my grandfather's and went out on the water often.

For a time, my mom did seem to improve. Less midnight babble. Less astronomical observation. Her hooch still flowed like the Pa.s.saic, but not so much that she couldn't start doing a bit of bookkeeping at Grandpa's hardware store while I helped with the shelving of paint cans, drill bits, saws, glue pots, and yes, even boxes of nails after school. Rowing and fresh spring-into-summer air brought a bit of healthy glow back to her cheeks. Life seemed on the upswing.

It was an afternoon in late September-the first autumn colors blus.h.i.+ng in the red maples and sweetbay magnolias, the rushes and deer-tongue gra.s.s swaying in breezes-that hinted of cooler days to come, that we rowed out for what would prove to be the last time. We'd made liverwurst and onion sandwiches together back at the house, her favorite. Some peanut-b.u.t.tered celery stalks, along with dill pickles and potato chips, were packed in the small wicker basket with a couple of bottles of cream soda. This was to be a real feast. Also, it was an important moment for me, since I'd finally got up the nerve to tell her-now that she seemed enough recovered from my father's suicide to act more or less normal-that our mother-son outings were going to have to wind down, maybe even stop. Some kids at school had seen us out here together on Grover's Mill Pond enough times that I was now officially getting razzed as a mama's boy. Time had come for both of us to grow up.

What happened next happened so fast I can scarcely picture it, quick as when a lightbulb blows out and the room goes instantly dark. We'd been talking about heaven knows what, a V of geese migrating south, how the pickles from Miller's are crisper than the ones from Malory's. Then I blurted it out. My concern about being seen out on the pond too often with my mommy, and how I was catching unholy flak for it at school. She pulled a hidden flask from her jacket pocket, unscrewed its cap, took a deep drink from it, and lit into me. Something about cowardice, something about me being my father's son, something about how alone she was in the world and that I couldn't possibly understand her pain. In the sorry wink of an eye, she was back to being her old unhappy self, wagging that silver flask in my face as she made her points.

My grabbing at it, slapping it away, was pure instinct. When it flew out of her hand and splashed in the greenish water, she just as unthinkingly stood up in the unsteady boat, s.n.a.t.c.hed one of the oars, and tried to fish her flask back. I shouted at her to stop, that she was going to fall overboard, but before she could even turn her head to respond, the boat tipped over, throwing us and our wickerbasket banquet into the pond.

Our immediate impulse was to save each other. That much I recall with total clarity. But since I was the only one of us who could swim well enough to possibly get to sh.o.r.e with heavy, waterlogged clothes acting as a full-body drag anchor, I flailed her over to the capsized rowboat and shouted at her to hang on until I came back with help.

"I'm gonna drown, just like him," she gurgled, water running out of her mouth. Her face was as white as paint primer.

"No you're not!" I shouted. "Just stay put, you hear me?"

Wriggling out of my coat and frantically toeing my shoes off, I swam like mad, frozen with fear as well as the water's chill. With every kick and doggy paddle stroke I made, the possibility that my mother was about to die in the same pond as my dad became more and more real. Half-drowned myself, I lurched into some sedge, covered in mud, slime, and a slick of slimy decomposing leaves that had fallen on the pond. By the time I managed to summon help, and some men hurried out to where the capsized rowboat serenely drifted, my mother had vanished into the murk. The frogmen, one of whom I recognized as having been on the same team that retrieved my drowned father not a year before, had her up to the surface in no time. But it was all too late. Her narrow pale face was already bloated, her lips gone purple.

So began a time in the house off Cranbury Road that degenerated from bad to awful. My grandmother and I hardly knew what to do with each other when alone in the same room. I think she blamed her son's suicide on my mother, my mother's death on me somehow, and also blamed me for having been the reason my parents were forced to get married in the first place. Much as I couldn't admit to personal responsibility in that matter-after all, I had no say in their out-of-wedlock lovemaking under spicysmelling sweet pepper bushes on the pond's bank-I understood how she could see me as a living symbol of her precious Wyatt's downfall. As for my grandfather, he was truly heartbroken, and shouldered much of the blame himself.

"If I hadn't got it in my head to fix up that boat ..." he would mutter, then his words would trail off.

Grandmother Iris, who got more brittle and cranky by the day, could only agree with him. After my mother was buried in the cemetery next to my father, I was left by default in her care. Ours was a house of grief. But whereas my grandfather grieved for my mother and me, I got the sense that Grandmother grieved mostly for herself and the burden that I now had become. In school, we read about the ancient mariner and the albatross. I'd become an albatross, if no longer taunted for being a mama's boy. The crowd of punks who'd made that accusation now shunned me for a different reason. I was, they decided, an angel of death. Someone to be avoided like the plague. I had neither the will nor way to contradict them. At home in bed, listening to the ticking clock in my parents' empty bedroom, I found myself wondering if they weren't right.

People die in threes. So goes the old saying. Though several years had pa.s.sed since my parents' drownings, one intentional, the other not, death once more came lurking to round out the number. My grandpa had taken ill with a case of walking pneumonia at Thanksgiving and was hospitalized in nearby Princeton by early December. The snow was particularly heavy that year. Wind drifted shapely piles around the house and frost clung to the windows in fernlike patterns. Since my grandmother hated driving in bad weather, a man named Franklin, who responded to an ad she placed in the local paper, drove us to the hospital every other day to visit. I couldn't help but notice that around Franklin my grandmother seemed to lighten up a little, which was a relief to me, since I could only imagine how, deep down, she must have faulted me for her husband's illness. Franklin sometimes stayed for dinner after we returned from Princeton, recounting the places in the world he claimed to have visited-exotic locales like Morocco and Brazil and Fiji. What he was doing in these far-flung countries and how he could afford all his globe-hopping was unclear to me, but what did I care. Pretending politeness, I listened, at least in the beginning, even though I figured it was all a pack of lies. If from the very beginning I didn't trust his stories and overconfident manner, his presence meant my grandmother and I weren't left alone at a painfully silent table. For that I was grateful.

As with my mother, my grandfather seemed to be improving daily, only to abruptly take a downward turn and die of complications between Christmas and New Year's. My grandmother's heartbreak over this, I must admit, startled me. She wept the most genuine tears I'd ever seen well from her steely eyes. For a time, I wondered if she wasn't going to end up in the hospital herself, so bereft was she. Neighbors dropped by with tuna ca.s.serole, cold fried chicken, and potato salad, which I lived on for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, noticing that she ate nary a morsel.

Franklin helped make arrangements with the crematorium and drove us over to the funeral home so we could pay our last respects before Grandfather was fed to the furnace. Though she abhorred her husband's final wish not to be laid to rest in the ground, where he would rot like old maggoty timber, my grandmother honored his instruction. We caravanned with several dozen of his friends and longtime customers to the dam-end of the pond, where the ice was still unfrozen. On a gusty, blue-sky day in the dead of winter, the minister delivered yet another eulogy before my grandfather's ashes, gray as pumice, were scattered on the equally gray water. I couldn't help but think, as I burrowed my freezing face into my wool m.u.f.fler, that at twenty-five dollars per eulogy, our family kept the minister so busy he might as well have been put on hardware store's payroll.

Gallows humor, not very funny. But I didn't have much to laugh about, anyway. The wind made a swirling snow-devil out at the far edge of the pond, where some kids were ice-skating, blissfully unaware of why a bunch of people in overcoats were huddled down at our end. We trudged along after the service, climbed in our cars, and slowly drove home.

Life at school didn't improve. The opposite. I should have been grateful that the punks had given up teasing me, but instead I felt ignored. What was worse, I was now pitied by many of my imbecile cla.s.smates. How I hated the sympathetic stares I got from students I hardly knew. Walking the hallway between cla.s.ses became an ordeal both embarra.s.sing and infuriating. My only recourse was to feign sickness as a way of getting out of school for stretches of time, at least until winter subsided. And when the weather warmed, I simply began ditching cla.s.ses and hanging out by myself down at the pond. The school's student counselor dropped by one evening and spoke about my absences and failing grades with my grandmother and Franklin, who was by that evening, as he was most every evening now. I eavesdropped from an adjacent room and was relieved and angered by my grandmother's response which was, in essence, "The boy's suffered a series of bad blows and ought to be allowed to work through his mourning as need be." I was relieved because this meant I was, as I understood, freed from adults lording over me, telling me what to do. Angered because I knew, even then, I didn't have the first idea how to mourn, and was essentially abandoned to my own devices from that moment on.

At what point did I begin to suspect Franklin was trying to seduce my grandmother? I was young enough at the time-fifteen at the end of World War II-that anyone beyond their teens was an oldster to me, yet in retrospect I realize Franklin must have only been in his mid-forties. Though my grandmother was a decade or more his senior, she was still a handsome woman in her hawkish way. But no, I thought, shoving away this disgusting thought as one might a snapping rabid dog. Don't be ridiculous. Franklin, fraud though he might be, was acting charitably toward a sonless widow and a luckless orphan stuck under the same roof, wasn't he?

I wasn't overly surprised when he moved into the house that spring as a boarder. My grandmother explained she could use the extra money to help pay down the mortgage, but I knew she could have gone on just fine without, living off the healthy proceeds of the sale of the hardware store. I had grim mixed feelings about the way things were developing. On one hand, as I say, I welcomed the buffer Franklin const.i.tuted between my grandmother and me. On the other, it took my breath away, angered and confused me, how proprietary he became. Not just toward my grandmother but the whole household, myself included. His authority was established with an almost businesslike swiftness, as if he were born to the task. Impressive, too, was the ease with which he pushed back whenever I got it in my head to challenge him, even over the slightest thing.

When I commented, testing his patience one evening during dinner, that Franklin was more a last than a first name, he laughed softly, picked a fleck of tobacco that came loose from his handrolled cigarette with his thumb and pinky finger, and said, "I've heard that one before. Benjamin Franklin and all."

"Well, why don't you let people just call you Frank? Wouldn't that be easier?"

"Would you want to call our recently deceased president Frank Delano Roosevelt?"

"Why not? It's less of a mouthful," I countered. "Anyway, you're not the president."

He regarded me with a slow sidelong glance. "I like you, Wyatt. And respect you enough not to call you Wy. Franklin comes from the Middle English word for freeman-Frankeleyn. Frank means something else altogether. The Franks were a German tribe, named after a kind of spear they used back in the early times. When they moved from Germany to Gaul, that's how France got its name. I hate the Germans and can't stand Frenchmen. But I like the idea of being a freeman. So, Franklin it is," he said, and took another drag off his cigarette.

Increasingly, he enjoyed making smart little speeches like this while my grandmother now and then glanced over at me and nodded, as if to say, You might learn something if you keep your trap shut and listen.

I didn't hate him, not yet, but I couldn't figure Franklin out, either. He seemed never to have worked a day in his life, and it was unclear to me where he came from, what his background was, if he had family, how he knew so much, and how he managed always to have enough money to pay his room and board. The first person I ever heard use the word enigma was Franklin. And though he was talking about something else, politics or religion, say, when I asked him what it meant and he answered, "Anything that's baffling," I knew I'd never forget that word because it perfectly defined Franklin himself.

For instance, how could anybody dislike my grandfather's sweet old dog, Claude? I inherited him after my grandfather pa.s.sed away. For a while, Claude became my best friend in the world. I could tell that he missed his master as much as I did, but he slipped into the habit of sleeping on the rug by my bed at night and accompanying me on my walks around the pond. A mangy mutt with a messy coat of blacks and browns and what looked like a smile perennially on his face, Claude-so named because he was p.r.o.ne to knocking things over, digging up the yard, a real clod, in other words-was a comfort to me, a pal in those months of grieving the loss of my one remaining male relative. As much affection as I directed toward Claude, Franklin showed him a hostile impatience.

"That dog should be kept outdoors," he told my grandmother at breakfast one day, after Claude had an overnight accident on the front room rug.

"It's my fault," I argued. "I should have taken him out for a walk before I went to bed. He couldn't help it."

Franklin's condescending smile was directed toward my grandmother, as he continued, "He's pretty old not to be house-trained. By which I mean Claude, not Wyatt, of course. With your permission, I can build a dog house for him."

"I don't know," my grandmother hesitated. "There's a foot of snow out there. I'm afraid he might freeze."

"Dogs are used to weather. He'll be fine."

Seeing that my grandmother was actually weighing Franklin's inhumane proposal, I slapped my hand on the table, making the silverware jump, and shouted, "No way is Claude going to be thrown out in the cold! He'll die out there. Grandma, I promise it won't happen again. He's a good boy."

When, a month later, Claude disappeared, never to be found, I knew Franklin was somehow behind it. I had no proof, however, and because we three had been all but s...o...b..und together, the weather that winter being the worst anybody could remember, I couldn't figure when or how he would have managed to spirit Claude away without me or my grandmother noticing. At the same time, there were no telltale tracks in the snow. It was as if Claude had simply floated away, transported into the sky on flurries.

The spring following my grandfather's funeral, Franklin busied himself fixing rain gutters that had been damaged during a wet, heavy April blizzard, the last of that wretched season. He worked on repairing the front porch, wearing a jacket that had been my father's and a porkpie hat I recognized as my grandpa's. A closetshopping regular part of the family, he'd become, not that I had much say in the matter. I knew if I confronted my grandmother about the indecency of Franklin wearing these clothes, I'd get a sharp rebuke in response. Instead, resentment started to build in me like steam in a pressure cooker. I sensed he could tell, and that he got a perverse kick out of it.

One day he found me down at the pond fis.h.i.+ng. Clearly, he'd been looking for me, because he said, "There you are."

I didn't look up from my line lying like a skinny snake on the water. "There I am," I said.

My grandmother had recently accused me of being more and more disconnected from those around me, and I didn't bother to argue with her. I was even more disconnected than she knew. Had been in a couple of fights after school, on days I was forced to attend, and simply let the other guy win, if only to avoid having to talk about it later. I figured if I'd somehow pulled off a victory, I would have to accept congratulations from kids I hated or else deal with demands for a rematch. I wanted nothing to do with any of that malarkey. Instead, I filched some cover-up powder from my mother's cosmetics kit to camouflage my black eye and bruises, though I wondered if it was possible, actually, to filch anything from my mom now that she was dead and gone.

"Catching anything?"

I squinted up at him, said, "Caught a pretty good size stick an hour ago."

"Threw it back, I guess," he quipped, sitting next to me.